Ciro Santilli's projects

Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

A summary of minor projects is given at: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.

This section is a dump for anything else, to keep those sacred first sections that show on the top of the homepage clean.

The markup language of OurBigBook.com.

Also used on Ciro Santilli's website as a static website via the OurBigBook CLI.

The one markup language to rule them all?

Documentation at: docs.ourbigbook.com.

Official Command-line interface to convert a directory of OurBigBook Markup files into a static website. See also: cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-cli

Base JavaScript library that implements the OurBigBook Markup. Use by both:

The website system that runs OurBigBook.com. For further information see:Relies on the OurBigBook Library to compile OurBigBook Markup.

More info at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-topics

More info at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree

As mentioned at Section "Linux Kernel Module Cheat", this should be merged into that other project.

If Ciro Santilli weren't a natural born activist, he chould have made an excellent intelligence analyst! See also: Section "Being naughty and creative are correlated".

Outside this website:

In this project Ciro Santilli extracted (almost) all Git commit emails from GitHub with Google BigQuery! The repo was later taken down by GitHub. Newbs, censoring publicly available data!

Ciro also created a beautifully named variant with one email per commit: github.com/cirosantilli/imagine-all-the-people. True art. It also had the effect of breaking this "what's my first commit tracker": twitter.com/NachoSoto/status/1761873362706698469

In 2016 Ciro made a script downloaded Facebook profile pictures.

This was possible at the time without any login by using a 2010 profile ID dump from originally announced at: blog.skullsecurity.org/2010/return-of-the-facebook-snatchers since profile picture access was not authenticated.

The profile ID dump was downloadable through a BitTorrent named fbdata.torrent of about 2.8GB, mostly compressed. Doing:on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:This dump widely reported e.g. on Hacker News at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554558.

At some point however, Facebook finally started to require tokens to view public profile pictures, thus making such further collection impossible, e.g. as of 2021: developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v9.0/user/picture mentions:This is also mentioned e.g. at: stackoverflow.com/questions/11442442/get-user-profile-picture-by-id. This major privacy flaw was therefore finally addressed at some point, making it impossible to reproduce this project.

Ciro downloaded 10 thousand of those pictures, and did facial extraction with: stackoverflow.com/questions/13211745/detect-face-then-autocrop-pictures/37501314#37501314

He then created single a video by joining 10 thousand of those cropped faces which can be uploaded e.g. to YouTube. Ciro later decided it was better to make those videos private however, as sooner later he'd lose his account for it.

Companies like YouTube blocking this kind of content is the type of thing that makes companies take longer to fix such gaping privacy issues, and is a bit like security through obscurity. A video makes it clear to everyone that there is a privacy issue very effectively. But people prefer to hide and look away, and then 99% of people who know nothing about tech get their privacy busted by actual criminals/government spies and never learn about it.

But now that Facebook finally fixed it, it's fine, no need for the video anymore.

Ciro Santilli has enjoyed doing projects dealing with with lots of data! They usually have a large overlap with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, but not always!

This mini-project walks the category hierarchy Wikipedia dumps and dumps them in various simple formats, HTML being the most interesting!

Scripts used: